Return to Solaris, the latest LP from acclaimed electronic musician Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug, King Midas Sound, etc.) - a stunningly immersive rescoring of Andrei Tarkovsky’s legendary 1972 science-fiction epic, Solaris, issued by Phantom Limb - captures one of the UK's most versatile and prolific artists in a fascinating state of transition. Pushing far into the field of experimental electroacoustic music, it channels the film's psychological intensity through sheets of atonality, synthesis, and long tones, culminating as a masterfully compelling sonorous narrative that rests upon a razor's edge at the juncture between the future and the past.

With a pioneering career that dates back the early 1990s and spans a near countless number of genres, it is only recently, beginning with his 2019 LP for Room40, Sirens, that Kevin Richard Martin has begun to release work under his own name. Once again delving toward new territories, his first outing with the Brighton, UK based imprint, Phantom Limb, Return to Solaris stands among his most ambitious outings to date, encountering him rescoring Andrei Tarkovsky’s legendary 1972 film Solaris. Drenched in tense long tones and deep, electronic ambiences, it rises to a task that few artists would dare.

Despite having largely made his name over the last two decades working under the moniker The Bug, as well as within King Midas Sound and Zonal - sculpting a body of work that spans the popular idioms of Grime, Dubstep, and Dancehall - Kevin Richard Martin has a fairly long history working in the realm of experimental music, first as a member of genre bending ensembles like God, Ice, and Experimental Audio Research during the 1990s, and then more recently with a body of electroacoustic efforts issued under his own name.

Following on the back of 2019’s LP Sirens, and a series of recent cassette releases issued by his own imprint, Intercranial Recordings, Martin’s latest, Return to Solaris, is the result of an invitation by the Vooruit Arts Centre in Gent, Belgium, during 2020, to compose a new score for a film of his choice. Having been long inspired by pioneering Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, his 1972 masterpiece, Solaris, was the “natural choice”, faced with trepidation, given the original score was composed by regular Tarkovsky collaborator and early Soviet electronic musician Eduard Artemyev is often regarded as a masterpiece unto itself.

Mirroring the film’s intense, psychologically devastating and bleakly compelling temperaments - interweaving themes of love, horror, sorrow, nostalgia, memory and dystopia - Martin’s score deftly rises to the monumental task set before him. Deploying atonal noise, waves of distorted synthesis, thick drones and otherworldly, astronomic sound-design, across the album’s 4 sides, the film’s subtly submerged motifs enter states of reactance, rising and falling amidst the density of an electronic space that conceptually reflects both the future and the past.

Phantom Limb’s beautiful double LP pressing of Kevin Richard Martin’s Return to Solaris is a brilliant homage to one of the greatest films of all time.